Today’s Worst Legal Argument Ever

This one’s good.

James Pischel, 31, had been sent to prison for arranging a meeting with what he thought was a 15-year-old girl, a girl that actually turned out to be officer Ed Sexton of the Lincoln, Nebraska police. Yes, they’ve got a guy with sex in his name handling luring cases, I did notice that.

Anyway, for reasons I’m not entirely up on, Pischel’s case has found its way to the Nebraska State Supreme Court. During arguments recently, Pischel’s attorney Matt Graff put forwardthe following defense:

His attorney, Matt Graff of the Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office, argued the investigator played on Pischel’s emotions and continued to chat with him after Pischel said no thanks — she was too young — two months earlier.

When Pischel said he wouldn’t meet, the investigator sent an angry face emoticon. When Pischel tried to end the chat without contacting the “girl” again, the investigator blew him a “kiss.”

Graff said it was done by typing certain keys that create a picture, similar to a smiley face made by a colon and a parenthesis. In this case, he argued, it added up to government inducement — by case law, opportunity plus “something else.”

“At first blush, it seems kind of silly to say the opportunity plus something else is an angry emoticon, an angry face. But that’s really what it is,” Graff said.

He argued Pischel should have a new trial because the jury wasn’t allowed to be given an instruction on the entrapment defense.

Perhaps if Pischel had been given some instruction on the block button or the escape key, he wouldn’t be paying a lawyer to stand in front of the highest court in the land and spew this garbage with a straight face. It’s even worse because he had already admitted during the trial that not only did he start the conversation, but he also kept it going, made sexual advances towards the girl and gone to a park to meet up with her. Nobody, and I mean nobody, does something like that just because a little kid on a computer told him to. I therefore submit, Mr. Graff, that the reason the jury wasn’t allowed to consider the entrapment defense is simply because it’s completely ludicrous and would hold water about as well as the babies your client seems to like hitting on over the internet.

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